
The series consisted of two dramas carefully selected by Calasso, based on Ernest Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and Other Stories (originally published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, 1938): The Undefeated and The Killers. The first was set in the Spain of bullfighters, while the second was set in the underworld of the American provinces. The sets were completely recreated in the studios of the Rai Production Center in Naples.

This is the magical story of a new-born baby abandoned on the doorstep of a Franciscan monastery, who grows up to become a cheerful and mischievous boy called Marcelino Pan y Vino. Marcelino, who is able to talk with animals, lives very closed to the animals, the trees and plants. He delights in discovering new things, and often asks unusual questions. The friars educate and love the boy.


Paul, Joe and Louie are three young men from good families who decide to go on a bloodthirsty and pointless crime spree, much to the dismay of paul’s girlfriend and the local police commissioner. the group starts by robbing a gas station where paul guns down three innocent bystanders. When they later decide to rob a bank and a grocery store, paul ends up killing more people. It isn’t long before the entire police force is looking for the three criminals, who pick up the girl and hightail it to the Swiss border, killing everyone in their path.

In 1916, laconic adventurer Corto Maltese is in Paramaribo, Surinam visiting his mystic female friend Java. He helps a young heir haunted by voodoo spirits, delivers some weapons to rebels in Brazil and hunts for treasure with Rasputin.

During the WW2, two friends fall in love with the same woman. Ideologically divided by the conflict that engulfs Italy and their lives, the three young people will eventually reunite after a dramatic confrontation.

In 1913, laconic sea captain Corto Maltese, adrift in the Pacific, gets rescued by his bandit friend Rasputin who's taking two rich shipwrecked teens to an island where his boss the Monk will hold them for ransom. WWI complicates things.


Having discovered that his son will send him to a nursing home, an old professor (Marcello Mastroianni) converses with the memory of his late wife. She encourages him to tell his son that he is sad and fearful, and does not want to move. Recording of Marcello Mastroianni’s last stage project.

Hugo Pratt's famous comics adventurer, Corto Maltese while sojourning in Adana, Turkey, discovers a map to the treasure of Cyrus, an ancient king of Persia. To assist him in his quest, he enlists his old friend/nemesis the unbelievable Raspoutine whom he first has to help escape from the prison of Samarkand (aka "La maison dorée de Samarkand", the golden house of Samarkand). On the long and tortured way to the riches, he encounters all kind of interesting characters, soldiers of fortune, lost British actors, and even his doppelgänger.